Patient Advocacy Groups Submit Letter in Support of BIOSIM Act

On July 1, 2021, twenty-eight patient advocacy groups submitted a letter demonstrating their support for the BIOSIM Act (H.R. 2815).  The legislation was introduced on April 22, 2021 with the purpose of increasing Medicare payments for biosimilars for a five-year period.  The letter praises the BIOSIM Act as “critical to reducing costs and improving patient access to biosimilars in the U.S.”  More specifically, the letter endorses the Act’s mechanism of temporarily increasing reimbursement for biosimilars from average sales price (ASP) plus 6% to ASP plus 8% where the biosimilar price is lower than the reference product price.  The patient advocacy groups see the Act as a way of fixing the “misaligned financial incentives within the Medicare program [that] continue to encourage the use of high-cost brand biologics even when a lower-cost biosimilar medicine is available.”  The latest action on the Act was a referral to the Subcommittee on Health on April 23, 2021.